Methane is supercharging the climate crisis

From Our World in Data

From The Hill

In the fight against climate change, the focus is usually on carbon dioxide, or CO2 — and for good reason. It’s a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for [thousands of] years, trapping in heat for generations to come. Yet there is an even more potent planet-warming gas whose destructive powers have long gone hidden — until now.

Methane traps heat in the atmosphere with 80 times the power of CO2 over 20 years. While it breaks down in the atmosphere faster than carbon dioxide, the damage it does is more immediate.

The good news is that, thanks to recent developments in leak monitoring, we can halt much of the methane emitted from various human activities before it reaches the atmosphere, a tactic that, because of methane’s potency and short shelf life, could have an almost immediate impact.

Scientists around the world now have tools at their disposal to trace otherwise invisible methane leaks. With spectrometers, satellite surveillance, drones and handheld devices, they can now create sophisticated, multilayered maps that reveal how and where methane plumes are entering the atmosphere. The aggregation of this data is so precise, in fact, that scientists can pinpoint methane leaks down to the exact location.

What they’ve discovered is telling.

The fossil fuel industry has been drilling and refining oil and its byproducts for over 150 years, and it has left behind a legacy of pollution and dodged accountability. So-called “orphaned” wells, or wells that have been abandoned by the oil companies that originally drilled them, litter the United States, including my home state of Louisiana. When these wells aren’t abandoned outright, ownership is transferred to a shell company without the funding to clean them up. They can remain uncapped for generations, leaking carcinogens and other toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and unleashing plumes of methane into the atmosphere.

Last month, I testified in Baton Rouge on behalf of important legislation to hold oil companies accountable for the wells they previously drilled. Under current law, the expense of eventually capping wells is left to taxpayers. Passing abandoned well accountability legislation in state after state is a workable solution to halting this contributor to climate change.

Beyond avoiding accountability for its methane emissions, the industry also engages in “greenwashing,” or making their products seem cleaner than they are. Nowhere is this more apparent than the case of “LNG” or “liquified natural gas,” as the industry calls it.

Here’s the truth: “natural” gas is methane. It’s not a pure product and contains elements of other toxins, but methane is the active ingredient. That’s because when methane is not leaked or wasted, it can be a powerful fuel due to its high combustibility.

The industry’s process for extracting gas through fracking, moving it through pipelines, liquefying it and shipping it overseas is an energy intensive and wasteful process. From the well head through the pipeline to the export terminal and beyond, methane is leaked into the atmosphere. To regulate pressure along the pipeline and in the liquefaction plant, companies flare, or burn off the excess, just above ground level, releasing methane along with any other particulate matter.

Here too, the fossil fuel industry needs to be held to account. Sending a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere while marketing it as a “green” alternative to oil is dishonest.

The Department of Energy’s report on the federal “pause” on LNG permitting has just been released. In her statement, Secretary Jennifer Granholm confirmed what so many of us have long known: LNG exports are a ticking greenhouse gas time bomb. “An LNG project exporting 4 billion cubic feet per day – considering its direct life cycle emissions – would yield more annual greenhouse gas emissions by itself than 141 of the world’s countries each did in 2023,” she noted.

It’s time to end federal permitting of new LNG gas export terminals. Absent federal action, state and local officials must refuse zoning, land use, public interest and other permits to stop the industry’s reckless expansion.

Methane in the atmosphere has shot up in the past two decades, and it continues to be emitted in quantities that make a stable climate impossible. Manmade emissions have warmed the planet so much that melting permafrost and wetlands are now also releasing methane, causing a “doom spiral” that will soon become uncontrollable.

There is hope. By exposing the industry’s emissions, mandating the capping of wells and downscaling the use of fossil fuels, we can draw down this potent greenhouse gas — and we must. Our future depends on it.

Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré (Ret.) is a former commanding officer of the U.S. First Army. He led Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans following the devastating Category 5 hurricane. He is currently head of The Green Army, an organization dedicated to finding solutions to pollution.

About 1/3rd of the rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times (by convention, taken to mean 1850-1900 for the purposes of calculating the rise in temperature, currently already at 1.5 degrees C) is due to higher levels of methane in the atmosphere. If we slashed emissions from agriculture and "fugitive emissions" (gas leaks), the level of methane in the atmosphere would start falling immediately (it decays within 12 years to CO2), and we would stop temperatures rising for two decades, giving us more time to cut CO2 emissions. 

2.9 billion birds gone

From Climate & Capitalism

Worldwide, 49 percent of all wild bird species are in steep decline. BirdLife International’s authoritative report, State of the World’s Birds 2022, estimates that there are now nearly three billion fewer wild birds in Canada and the U.S. than a few decades ago, and about 600 million fewer in the European Union. Less comprehensive data is available for the global south, but studies in some South American, African and Asian countries have shown similar declines.

Many accounts of bird population decline simply list multiple possible causes for the decline — wind turbines, urbanization, climate change, logging, wildfires, hunting and even domestic cats. The absence of data on which factors are most important has been a convenient excuse for doing nothing to save the birds.

An important study published in the May 15 issue of PNAS — the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — takes that excuse away. Its title clearly states its principal finding: Farmland Practices Are Driving Bird Population Decline across Europe. The study “provides strong evidence of a direct and predominant effect of farmland practices at large continental scales.”

This is by far the most extensive study to date of bird population dynamics. Over fifty ornithologists, zoologists, biologists and ecologists analyzed decades of population data for 170 bird species in over 20,000 sites in 28 European countries, measuring them against four known pressures on bird populations: agricultural intensification, change in forest cover, urbanization and temperature change.

Between 1980 and 2016 European bird populations as a whole fell by a quarter, but the number of farmland birds dropped by more than half. Areas dominated by large farms saw bigger declines than areas where most farms are smaller.

The single biggest cause of bird declines is chemical-intensive farming. Some birds are killed by pesticides or herbicides, but the most important impacts are loss of food, especially insects and other invertebrates that most bird species depend on, and the spread of fertilizer-intensive monocultures that eliminate shelter and nesting areas. Insect-eating populations declined more than any others.

In short, the collapse of farmland bird populations is closely related to the Insect Apocalypse in the Anthropocene, discussed here recently. The mass slaughter of insects is killing masses of birds.

Industrial agriculture is not, of course, the only driver. Loss of habitat resulting from urban growth and deforestation caused declines, in those areas, of 27.8% and 17.7% respectively. Climate change had mixed effects — northern, cold-preferring birds fell 39.7%, and southern, warm-preferring bird species dropped 17.1%. Overall, however, the most important bird killer is large-scale capitalist agriculture.

The study concludes:

“Considering both the overwhelming negative impact of agricultural intensification and the homogenization introduced by temperature and land-use changes, our results suggest that the fate of common European bird populations depends on the rapid implementation of transformative change in European societies, and especially in agricultural reform.”